Life after Death | 清明
清明时节雨纷纷，路上行人欲断魂。
-Oh well it kind of drizzle today, and my family was rather stun by today’s events-
If anybody were to complain that “扫墓”is a boring day, they would be damn surprise to know the story of what happened today to my family. Let’s start with waking up in the morning. After all the daily stuff you do in the morning, we went to wait for taxi to appear. On normal days, that road which we were waiting by the side had a lot of taxis. Anyway, those which happened to pass by are all “empty”. So we deicide to flag them down. Guess what? All of them were on their way to having breakfast at the hawker center nearby. Anyway, finally we got a taxi and made our way to Mandai columbium.
Everything went on unbelievably smoothly. We went to pray to our Great-Great Grand parents (Oh my…) at the third floor. My brother and I took the Joss paper to the first floor to burn. Suddenly I heard someone called my name and I looked up to see, not a ghost la, my father calling me. The most hilarious thing rained down on me when we went back upstairs. My father was trying to keep himself from laughing, my mum said:
“我们拜错祖先。。。”
Oh my goodness…that’s what happens if you are hopelessly trying to remember your great great grand parents whom none of us there were born when they were alive. Haiz… even this kind of stuff can make mistake. I am embarrassed not because of the mistake, but because of the fact that I had spotted that the people whom we were praying to were from Hainan (its written there). Hello…I am obviously from a Hokkien family, and if my memory serves me well, hainan is definitely not hokkien. Hainan has its own slang and dialect which I will never forget. To think that I have been chastising people for keeping ideas or comments to themselves, I better 面壁思过, reflect on this.
If that’s all, I will not be writing this in my blog. After that we move to another block to pray to my grandparents. (Finally somebody whom I know personally) Nothing much happened here except my parents being bias, gotten more joss paper for my father’s parents. People were burning their stuff slowly, my family in our rush to other place just threw everything in. Result: The ashes flew everywhere in the air and people were staring at us. Oh well…
Next we took a taxi to Mac Ritchie. If you think that cemetery is quite scary, think again. We alighted at the roadside, and move into a graveyard. There are no paved road for you to step on, only grasses, with the bonus of stepping onto other people’s grave. The fortunate thing is that my great-grand mother’s grave is not as far in as the next person we would be going to pray. The gravestone was already going to fall out. Just then, a man came towards us and demanded that we pay up for the cleaning fees for that particular grave. The negotiation is too minute as compared to the rest of the story, it shall not be mentioned here. After having enough of giant ants crawling on us, we left the place.
We took a bus and alighted one stop later, more stepping onto people’s graves. This time is worse as some of the trees have fallen, and we had to either stoop low to cross it or go over it. Finally reach a paved road and I was so relieve until my memory informed me: from the experience of last year (yep that this is my second year going on this “trip”), there is more grave-trampling to be done. Then the nightmare began. We reach our destination only to find out that the grave “is not there”. My father, brother and I spread out to search for my great grandfather’s grave. My mum was left at some other’s people grave, looking after our stuff. I was only one who’s daring enough to use a tree branch to brush away the covered headstone to check for my grandfather’s name. (My father remembered…) It was red alert when we couldn’t find it after 15 minutes. We spread even further. Suddenly, my mum’s voice rang out in that forest, calling us back to the “bass”. Yep, you are not wrong if you had guessed that my mum found the grave. It was just directly in front of the bass, but it was so covered by plants and weeds, that nobody took noticed of it, except my mum of course. That was about 20 plus minutes later. To think that my mum’s intuition and luck is so strong, that even without moving far away, she still can locate the grave. We gotten some workers and paid them to remove all the plants from the grave. The extent of the growth can be told when the person has to find the machine to cut them away. Mind you, if you think it is the machine meant for grass cutting, let me tell you that the cutter is a thick metal piece and not some plastic meant for cutting grass. Cutting short the story, we made our way out soon after and took another taxi to Mt. Vernon columbium. What a time we spent on “grave-searching”.
No more greats or grand something le. This time is to pray to my aunt. If you think I know her better than the rest, then you are wrong. She died 2 years after I was born, at the age of 30. So… Anyway everything was fine until we decided to burn Joss paper for her. The part when we toss 2 coins to ask “permission” from her. Statistics tells me that there is a 50% chance of getting it right. But, for eight times, even after we changed people to toss, change the arrangement of the food, clean her headstone, wait for a few more minutes to pass, whatever other thing we can think of, she still gives us the negative answer. It was already 1pm and we were all in the mood for lunch already. 8 times…
Finally it is positive on the 9th try.
That ends the whole “扫墓”saga. Oh well enrichment week starts from tmr, and I am already so geared up for it. Come on la, “扫墓”meant to be boring one can be so overly exciting for me, I don’t see why other stuff cannot. Cheers!